Google May Break The Ice With Meetro

Sources say the search engine company may be ready to acquire introware company Meetroduction. Once Google picked up Meetroduction by the end of the week. The Meetro software, for Windows platforms, has been described as a proximity-based way of finding like-minded people around you in a given geographic area. Dodgeball.com does something similar, and will connect users to a vast network of like-minded people, provided they live in one of 22 cities in the United States. For Meetro users, the software adds buddy-locating to an IM client; support for AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, and ICQ is included, with MSN Messenger and Jabber support forthcoming. That might be a popular concept for technophiles and the more socially courageous people out there, but for most people the anonymity of instant messaging is a welcome feature. So why Meetroduction? For that matter, why Dodgeball? The nature of both products seems to indicate an extension of Google's local search capabilities. here